Tuesday, July 17, 2007

salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM): Color on resignations

- Cowen comments on salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) after the co last nigth filed an 8K announcing the resignation of Bill Dewes, the company's Chief Accounting Officer. Dewes joined SFDC nine months ago from Hyperion. This comes on the heels of last week's unannounced resignation of the company's Director of Treasury, and marks the second resignation of a senior finance person in less than a week.

Firm notes they view these resignations as a sign of waning morale and other garden variety personnel issues associated with high growth companies experiencing growing pains in a white hot labor market. While they are not sure where Mr. Dewes will wind up, competition for talent in the Valley is very high, particularly for battle hardened managers that have experience working in On Demand/Subscription businesses.

Notablecalls: Expect to see weakness in CRM today. I didn't care when Rene Bonvanie resigned just 4 months after jonining the co (looking at his track record, the guy just keeps jumping from one co to another, often from competitor to competitor) but the two resignations highlighted by Cowen do sound alarming. Something is rotten in the sate of salesforce.com.

I also just love the way how CRM sneaked the news out in a late 8K filing. There is no point in wasting money on PR releases if the news isn't positive, eh?

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